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> mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost of a million CPU cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant As I understand it, in Bitcoi
by lucaspiller 14y ago
> mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost of a million CPU cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant
As I understand it, in Bitcoin the difficulty goes up so that the rate at which new coins are mined stays pretty much the same. The issue though is that each of the different mining architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) can do a magnitude more amount of work than the previous could. As such the difficulty goes up, so now there is the problem that unless you've got the fastest hardware you probably aren't going to get anything (as a solo miner anyway). If the rate at which they were mined was kept constant I'd guess all Bitcoins would have already been mined - in that case you'd still have the early adopter problem, but magnified even more.
- pepijndevos 14y agoWhat if you'd limit coins by time instead of cycles? You'd still need some crypto magic to keep people from playing with time, but in general, most people agree what the time is.
- Retric 14y agoThe rate of Bitcoin production drops in half every few years. It's a jagged curve designed to end-up producing a fixed number of bit-coins.
- Nursie 14y ago> As I understand it, in Bitcoin the difficulty goes up so that the rate at which new coins are mined stays pretty much the same. The rate halves every so often, the creation of new bitcoins slows over time, to the limit of 21 million. The limit is imposed by choice, if you kept creation proportional to some factor of the network rather than ever-decreasing and with a solid cap, you could change the game. I agree that processing power is not necessarily the best factor to relate it to.